I hope this SSD good/bad theme doesn't turn into one of those long-running "good for you/bad for you" food fiascoes (is coffee on the good list again, by the way? Blogging is thirsty work.) A new bit of investigation by Laptopmag seems to challenge the Tom's Hardware study that put SSD's battery performance in the shade. Citing flaws in the original method, the new study tried the drives under a more "real world use" test regime: cycling through webpages over and over.

Solid state drives (SSDs) are the inevitable future of mobile computing, but a new experiment by…
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They took a Gateway T-6828 with Vista Home Premium SP1 and tried it with its native Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEVS and two SSDs: a Samsung SATA II 64GB, and a SanDisk SATA 5000 32GB.

And guess what? Both SSD's resulted in an extra 10 minutes of battery life, versus the native hard drive. That's not a huge difference, sure, but it's a completely different story to the Tom's Hardware study which showed worse battery performance.

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Laptopmag admits that the absolute hardware choices both studies make may have a large impact, but they conclude "in real-world use, SSDs offer a small improvement in battery life." And, of course, there's the potentially faster loading times you get from SSD's, meaning your laptop's uptime may be more productive. [Laptopmag]